What’s Way More Important Than Going to the Ivy League

I live in a highly competitive town; the kind of town that is populated by over-educated, type-A parents who breed over-educated, highly competitive, type-A kids. Why, you may ask, do I live here? Well, when your kids are little and you are looking for a house you are easily swayed by a nice, safe community and blue ribbon schools. What you don’t realize though, is that while you intend to read Goodnight Moon and Polar Bear, Polar Bear to your kids, your neighbor will be reading Anna Karenina and War and Peace to his kids…in Russian.

Little by little though (when it’s too late to uproot your family) you start to see the signs: your kid can’t play competitive baseball past the age of 9 unless he can make the travel team (and if he can’t make the travel team then it’s time to pick a new sport); your daughter can’t get the lead in the community play and play soccer at the same time because only serious actors need apply for the leads; and don’t even think about having a child who wants to play an instrument in high school and explore another subject as an elective.

Although we managed to avoid most of that stress for the first 16 years of our oldest child’s life nothing prepared me for the ultimate competition…the college search.

When I am able to step off the habitrail of college craziness, I realize that I don’t actually care that my son is not looking at an Ivy League school. Contrary to what my neighbors say not everyone will attend a top-tier school nor should they. It reminds me of something that author and psychologist, Madeline Levine said in the documentary, “Race to Nowhere.” I’m paraphrasing here but she pointed out that when we were growing up (I’m speaking as a 40-something here) we knew that some kids would go to Harvard…now everyone thinks they are.

My son would not thrive at a highly rigorous university—for a dozen reasons (and no, I’m not trying to rationalize anything). My oldest is not an academic. He does not love to study. You will never catch him researching some random topic or reading the encyclopedia for fun (yes, that is what I used to do and yes, I am a total dork). But sometimes you realize that your kid is not you and they have other tremendous skills that are worth encouraging.

For instance, my oldest is highly adept at bringing disparate groups of people together and creating amazing connections between people. And—in what I view as his greatest skill—he has an uncanny ability to get other people to do things for him. Just the other day I told him that he couldn’t go out until he finished his chores. Fifteen minutes later two of his friends showed up at our door to help him clean the basement.

I guarantee they can’t teach that in college. Ivy League schools be damned.

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Connie Lissner is a writer, lawyer, wife and more importantly, the mother of two teenage boys. She was once told that a child’s job is to constantly push a parent’s limits and her boys do their job very well. She, in turn, is trying to do her job of not totally screwing them up. She navigates the slippery slope of motherhood one day at a time.Connie’s parenting failures have been featured on The Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, Scary Mommy, Club Mid, BlogHer and in the books, Not Your Mother’s Book…on Parenting and The BlogHer Voices of the Year: 2012. You can find her at isuckasaparent.com,www.facebook.com/isuckasaparentand on Twitter as @MotherInferior1